The scene was Allied press headquarters in Paris on a rainy summer day. Facing the half-dozing correspondents, Lieut. Colonel John A. Keck, onetime Pittsburgh engineer and now chief of Allied technical intelligence on German weapons, began quietly: "This will make Buck Rogers seem as if he lived in the Gay '90s." He proceeded to unfold the improbable story of what German scientists were up to when V-E day interrupted them. At a research center in Hillersleben a group of them ...

ALMOST every great city has a river. The poetic notion is that flowing water brings commerce, delights the eye, and cools the summer heat. But there is a more prosaic reason for the close affinity of cities and rivers. They serve as convenient, free sewers. The Potomac reaches the nation's capital as a pleasant stream, and leaves it stinking from the 240 million gallons of wastes that are flushed into it daily. Among other horrors, while Omaha's meat packers fill ...

Like many families, we try to escape the summer heat by going north. This year we spent a week in New Brunswick, Canada, at Shediac Beach, the self-proclaimed lobster capital of the world. But wait — Rockport, Maine, also calls itself the lobster capital of the world and has harvest data to back it up. Meanwhile, Nova Scotia claims the largest lobster ever caught, a 44-lb. monster capable of devouring a house pet. So what determines ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in LE NOUVEL OBSERVATEUR. The stars of an upcoming summer blockbuster, the world-famous Smurfs are once again the talk of the town — though not necessarily for all the right reasons. Known as Schtroumph in the original French, Puffi in Italian, Pitufos in Spanish, Stroumfakia in Greek, Kumafu in Japanese and Schlmpfe ...

Let's say you want to take an early-summer break from the weekly onslaught of action pictures and want to trade up in quality to an art-house film. Which actors would attract you? Surely Michael Fassbender, a smoldering sensation in Hunger, Fish Tank, Inglourious Basterds and Jane Eyre and a true MENSA heartthrob. Perhaps James McAvoy, the winsome Scot who played the nave doctor to Forest Whitaker's Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland and Keira Knightley's ...

With the end of school around the corner, the options for summer camp have gotten endlessly niche: there's rock-star camp, circus-arts camp, Hollywood-stunt camp. But in what may be a backlash to the glitz of it all, the hippest new kid on the block is the lowly farm camp, with tilling the earth now seen as a wholesome and character-building respite from video games and texting. The American Camp Association has surveyed its members to ...

FOR clothes-conscious American women, the summer of discontent is over; this week the autumn of decision begins. Home from vacation, they face the most difficult fall shopping dilemma in decades: whether to go for the midi. Not since Christian Dior's 1947 New Look has a descending hemline raised such a furor. Men denounce the midi as a threat to the golden days of mini ogling; women insist that it will make them look old, or ugly, or dumpy, or sawed-off—or ...

Recently I reread the adventures of Tom Sawyer after many years, and I was stunned to discover that Tom's summer vacation doesn't begin until the end of Chapter 21. Memory plays tricks. Tom's glorious idyll of mud, mild rebellion, chaste romance and rampant imagination electrified by a dash of danger and a blaze of heroismhad been filed in my mind under the heading of complete summer freedom. Even the most vivid scenes of Tom in school had ...

NEW ENGLAND: INDIAN SUMMER—Van Wyck Brooks—Dutton . During the '20s and '30s, Critic Van Wyck Brooks pondered a theory and a project. His project was to write a synthesis of U. S. culture in terms of the New England mind. The theory, used chiefly as a literary framework for the project, was German Philosopher Oswald Spengler's theory of cultural cycles: that cultures, like individuals, pass through youth and maturity to old age and death. Cultures are born in the countryside ...

If it's the first weekend in May, it must be Marvel superhero time. Spider-Man and its two sequels, plus both Iron Man movies and the Wolverine prequel, have all kick-started the summer movie season in burly style. Now it's Thor's turn. The Norse god — first Marvelized in a 1962 comic book — introduces what is conceived as a zillion-part movie series about the Avengers team of Marvel stalwarts. Captain America, impersonated by Chris Evans, gets his ...